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KF5JRV > TODAY 01.06.19 13:27l 9 Lines 4237 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
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Subj: Today in History - Jun 01
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Sent: 190601/1123Z 37350@KF5JRV.#NWAR.AR.USA.NA BPQ6.0.18
On June 1, 1968, Helen Keller dies in Easton, Connecticut, at the age of87. Blind and deaf from infancy, Keller circumvented her disabilities tobecome a world-renowned writer and lecturer.Helen Adams Keller was born on June 27, 1880, on a farm near Tuscumbia,Alabama. A normal infant, she was stricken with an illness at 19 months,probably scarlet fever, which left her blind and deaf. For the next fouryears, she lived at home, a mute and unruly child. Special education forthe blind and deaf was just beginning at the time, and it was not untilafter Helen’s sixth birthday that her parents had her examined by an eyephysician interested in the blind. He referred the Kellers to AlexanderGraham Bell, the inventor of the telephone and a pioneer in teachingspeech to the deaf. Bell examined Helen and arranged to have a teachersent for her from the Perkins Institution for the Blind in Boston.The teacher, 20-year-old Anne Sullivan, was partially blind. At Perkins,she had been instructed how to teach a blind and deaf student tocommunicate using a hand alphabet signaled by touch into the student’spalm. Sullivan arrived in Tuscumbia in March 1887 and immediately setabout teaching this form of sign language to Helen. Although she had noknowledge of written language and only the haziest recollection ofspoken language, Helen learned her first word within days: “water.öKeller later described the experience: “I knew then that ‘w-a-t-e-r’meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. Thatliving word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free.öUnder Sullivan’s dedicated guidance, Keller learned at a staggeringrate. By April, her vocabulary was growing by more than a dozen words aday, and in May she began to read and arrange sentences using raisedwords on cardboard. By the end of the month, she was reading completestories. One year later, the seven-year-old Keller made her first visitto the Perkins Institution, where she learned to read Braille. She spentseveral winters there and in 1890 was taught to speak by Sarah Fuller ofthe Horace Mann School for the Deaf. Keller learned to imitate theposition of Fuller’s lips and tongue in speech, and how to lip-read byplacing her fingers on the lips and throat of the speaker. In speaking,she usually required an interpreter, such as Sullivan, who was familiarwith her sounds and could translate.When she was 14, Keller entered the Wright-Humason School for the Deafin New York City. Two years later, with Sullivan at her side andspelling into her hand, she enrolled at the Cambridge School for YoungLadies in Massachusetts. In 1900, she was accepted into Radcliffe, aprestigious women’s college in Cambridge with classes taught by HarvardUniversity faculty. She was a determined and brilliant student, andwhile still at Radcliffe her first autobiography, The Story of My Life,was published serially in The Ladies Home Journal and then as a book. In1904, she graduated cum laudefrom Radcliffe.Keller became an accomplished writer, publishing, among other books, TheWorld I Live In (1908), Out of the Dark (1913), My Religion (1927),Helen Keller’s Journal (1938), and Teacher (1955). In 1913, she beganlecturing, with the aid of an interpreter, primarily on behalf of theAmerican Foundation for the Blind. Her lecture tours took her severaltimes around the world, and she did much to remove the stigmas andignorance surrounding sight and hearing disorders, which historicallyhad often resulted in the committal of the blind and deaf to asylums.Helen Keller was also outspoken in other areas and supported socialismall her life. For her work on behalf of the blind and the deaf, she waswidely honored and in 1964 was awarded the Presidential Medal ofFreedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, by President Lyndon B.Johnson.“My life has been happy because I have had wonderful friends and plentyof interesting work to do,ö Helen Keller once wrote, adding, “I seldomthink about my limitations, and they never make me sad. Perhaps there isjust a touch of yearning at times, but it is vague, like a breeze amongflowers. The wind passes, and the flowers are content.ö
73 de Scott KF5JRV
Pmail: KF5JRV@KF5JRV.#NWAR.AR.USA.NA
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